Monday, February 23, 2009



A picture of the blackout

Like many other blogs, No Right Turn was blacked out this morning as part of a webwide protest against the imposition of the guilt by accusation copyright law. So how did it go? Pretty well. Tumeke has assembled a collage of the top 50 NZ political blogs (according to their blogocracy), and the effect is obvious:

(Less obvious is the fact that even those blogs which are not completely blacked out had posts protesting the law as well).

So did it have any effect? Russell Brown thinks so:

Was the protest a success? Yes. On February 13, the rights owners stance on the draft code of conduct for ISPs was that they should be in the sole position to adjudicate their own claims, and that they should be make to pursue those claims without incurring any of the cost of the process, which should fall entirely on ISPs. Now, they can't understand why no one grasped that they were never opposed to an independent dispute resolution process.

That's a big shift. But the code is months away from agreement. A vague law that relies overwhelmingly on an unfinished code should, at the least, be delayed.

I agree. And we'll see whether that is happening this afternoon.

Update: Kiwipolitico has more here.